Across Arizona, lush, green, manicured golf courses offer an oasis from the desert and a resort from the hustle and bustle of the city.

Snake Hole Golf Club in Apache Junction is not one of those.

Snake Hole Golf Club was not carved out of the desert as much as plunked down amid it.

There are no water hazards. There is no water.

There are no sand traps, unless you count the anthills. There is the occasional rumored rattlesnake.

There is no grass. There is little green. But there are greens — made of dirt, some of which is mixed with vegetable oil to keep it flat and smooth around the cups.There are no divots here, just dust clouds when a duffer hits too low and scoops up a chunk of hard-packed earth with his club. The golfers don't use their best clubs on this course, knowing they take a beating.

"This is just a fun thing," said Bob Henrickson, 70, preparing to play a scramble on a recent January morning. "You don't get too excited. It doesn't matter how good you are (when) you get out here."

The history

There is a history of Snake Hole. But like the story of the Lost Dutchman in the nearby Superstition Mountains, it is difficult to tease out solid facts.The way it was told to Earl Davidson, the current president of the club, there was a couple from Canada who spent winters in Apache Junction. They stayed at the Countryside RV Resort on Idaho Road. They wanted to golf.

But the husband didn't want to pay country-club fees. So sometime in the mid-1980s he headed to the open desert across the street from the RV park and created two holes."It just expanded from there," Davidson said.

The state found out about the course and informed the golfers they were trespassing on state land.

The property is among 9.28million acres of land granted by the federal government to Arizona at statehood. It is land that is supposed to be held in trust to benefit public education. The state constitution does not specify benefits for winter visitors wanting to escape country-club fees.

In 1988, the state's land department created a land-use agreement with the operators of Snake Hole. The agreement, in effect until 2021, requires the club to pay $1,800 a year to use 15.7 acres of land.

Among the 11 articles in the agreement are requirements that the club maintain its own insurance policy and provisions for protecting native plants.

"We're not supposed to do a whole lot of landscaping," Davidson said.

The club pays the lease by charging membership dues of $20. The course also sells other passes for one-time or part-time guests. Those help make up the cost of the $600 insurance policy.

Davidson said the club used to hold a chili cook-off to cover the cost of the premium. But, in recent years, recycling aluminum cans has covered it.

About four times a year, Snake Hole members will treat the greens. They pour sand mixed with used vegetable oil. It makes the ground a little more firm, a little more stable, mimicking a grass green.

"In the earlier days they used motor oil," Davidson said. "But that's a no-no."

The course

The first challenge for golfers is crossing the street from the RV park to the course. The street is Arizona State Highway 88, known locally as Idaho Road.

Golfers tentatively drive carts or dash across while wheeling their clubs.

"If we hold up traffic, cops get after us," Henrickson said as he stopped in the median while wheeling his cart. Another golfer drove past in a cart. He said he would give Henrickson a ride, but he had a policy against having someone else in his cart while he crossed the highway. Liability issues.

The course is nine holes. None really trickier than any other. The longest is Hole 3 at 221 yards. The shortest is Hole 1 at 86 yards.

"You get more distance here because the ground is so hard," said Laverne Muehleip, 90. Balls skitter on the ground once they land.

Muehleip said the vegetation provides the biggest obstacles. "You have to get some altitude to get it over the bushes," he said.

By contrast, up the road a bit is another desert golf course near an RV park called the Bonita Vista Resort. But it is on private land. The course is mainly cleared of desert vegetation, leaving only hardpacked ground with little obstruction.

The official Snake Hole rules state that if a ball goes under a tree, it can be removed and replaced with no penalty.

Pieces of industrial low-pile carpet are used for the initial tee shots. But tees are allowed on all shots except those on the green. Because the ground is too hard to poke a tee into, golfers have made their own plastic or rubber tees to elevate the balls.

They tether the makeshift tees down with key rings and string so they don't fly off too far into the desert.

Holes are marked with flags affixed to a section of PVC pipe wired to a fence post. Those markers are there to differentiate the golf holes from the other holes — ant and gopher — that dot the course.

Near Hole 7, there is a manhole cover. Occasionally, it presents an olfactory hazard.

The southern backdrop is the traffic from the Superstition Freeway.

That roadway and the state highway to the east provide a steady sound of traffic. It is either soothing white noise or a distraction, based on your mind-set. For golfers who find it a distraction, this course might not be the best fit.

The strategy

Most golfers here say they still also play on grass.

What they try to do is play their game the same. They don't want to adopt bad habits to try to do better on the desert course.

Not that any changes to their game would help.

"You can hit the best-looking shot, and it hits a rock and ends up in a bush," Muehleip said. "You can hit the worst-looking shot, and it hits a rock and ends up on the green."Most courses hire groundskeepers to keep the course from affecting the game. Here, it is an added random element.

Golfers say there are two kinds of rocks scattered around the course: Canadian and Mexican rocks. Canadian rocks make a ball veer sharply north; Mexican rocks deflect shots south."It's not how you play, it's what kind of luck you have," said LaVonne Beckfield, 85.

It's why no one takes the game too seriously out here. Well, except Beckfield that one day.

"When I was a little bit younger, I threw my club one time," she said. "I heard it for months after that."

The members

Snake Hole is open only to people who live in the Countryside RV Resort. Guests are allowed, but they must come in with a member. Just like a regular country club.There are 90 members this year, Davidson said. That is down from 150 in years past.

Davidson said some of the newer residents of the RV park don't quite see the novelty in the course.

"The people that are coming in now, they just want to play on grass," he said. "They think this course destroys their grass game."

But the members are protective of their course.

Davidson said he doesn't envision opening Snake Hole to the public any time soon.

A few years back, members of Bonita Vista, the desert course a few miles away, wanted to have tournaments on each other's courses. That suggestion didn't fly."I just got about run out of town when I suggested it," Davidson said. "Nobody else is going to play on it."

Posting a comment to our website allows you to join in on the conversation. Share your story and unique perspective with members of the azcentral.com community.

Comments posted via facebook:

► Join the Discussion

Join the conversation! To comment on azcentral.com, you must be logged into an active personal account on Facebook. You are responsible for your comments and abuse of this privilege will not be tolerated. We reserve the right, without warning or notification, to remove comments and block users judged to violate our Terms of Service and Rules of Engagement. Facebook comments FAQ

Join thousands of azcentral.com fans on Facebook and get the day's most popular and talked-about Valley news, sports, entertainment and more - right in your newsfeed. You'll see what others are saying about the hot topics of the day.